Why Conventional Backup, Disaster Recovery Systems Fail

by Chris Preimesberger

Most IT pros reported that unscheduled downtime due to a natural or IT disaster has significant business implications. The most cited included employee unproductivity (84 percent), less efficient business operations (72 percent) and damage to the company’s reputation (57 percent). Additionally, 53 percent reported that revenues are lost during unscheduled downtime, and 49 percent reported that businesses incur unplanned costs to recover systems.

In a world where new technologies emerge daily, businesses are finding that in order to keep their traditional legacy backup and DR solutions up to snuff, they must continue to add new tools and products to their existing solutions to fill in the protection gaps. As a result, 90 percent of businesses are finding that they have more than one product for backup, replication, deduplication and recovery, and 61 percent reported those same products often provide duplicate functionality.

The addition of new features and products to an existing backup and recovery solution results in a steep learning curve. When working with multiple solutions, 67 percent of IT pros reported learning the ins and outs of all solutions was a major challenge. Furthermore, when multiple solutions are used, 59 percent reported that the requirement of additional effort and manpower in the event of a critical disruption was a major challenge, not to mention during day-to-day responsibilities.

In addition to the time IT pros put into learning multiple backup and recovery solutions, 46 percent reported the cost of acquiring licenses and maintenance for each solution in place as major price points for backup and recovery solutions. Additionally, 40 percent cited that the management of the vendors for each solution also causes backup and recovery costs to steeply rise.

Some companies believe the more solutions in place, the better business protection. However, contrary to popular belief, 71 percent of IT pros said that using multiple backup tools actually increases risk. How so? Forty-one percent of IT pros report difficulty to fully recover a business after a disaster because each tool works differently, and 39 percent said critical data may be missed because it is more complicated to review all backups.

Businesses are now backing up more than just mission-critical data and applications. Yet due to the increasing cost and complexity of traditional backup and DR solutions, few are backing up their entire systems. Consequently, when an outage occurs, businesses still feel much of the pain of complete data and application loss.

For small and midsize businesses, when a major IT disaster strikes, 41 percent reported that all IT hands are on deck and fully dedicated to the recovery process until the business is fully up and running again. While recovery is of the utmost importance, all other IT responsibilities fall to the wayside until all recovery issues are solved.

In the event of a catastrophic business interruption, it is imperative for IT pros to recover entire businesses immediately and get organizations back up and running shortly thereafter. However, very few—only 8 percent—of IT pros using traditional backup and recovery solutions said that in the event of a major IT failure, they could fully recover the business in less than one hour, while almost 25 percent said it would take more than a whole day.

While many of the common backup and recovery issues companies face actually stem from the traditional, cobbled-together legacy solutions implemented to supposedly protect their businesses, IT pros said they are often held responsible for problems that arise during DR, in addition to any data that cannot be recovered. Just over half of those questioned (51 percent) reported they believe they could lose their jobs if recovery went awry after a disaster.

Unlike traditional legacy backup and DR solutions, the majority of businesses reported they see the value in cloud-based recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) solutions. Benefits reported by IT pros include the ability to access all applications and data immediately via the cloud in the event of a disaster (41 percent); eliminating data loss and keeping the business up and running; faster recovery after a disaster (53 percent); and condensing vendor management with one platform (25 percent).